The numbers are not close
The average email open rate across industries is somewhere around 20 to 25 percent. That means if you send an email to 100 leads, roughly 75 to 80 of them will never see it. Of the ones who do open it, only a fraction will actually reply. For a contractor trying to start a conversation with a new lead, email is a slow and unreliable channel.
SMS open rates are consistently reported at 90 to 98 percent, with most messages being read within three minutes of receipt. That is not a marginal improvement. It is a fundamentally different outcome. When you send a text to a new lead, there is a very high probability they will see it almost immediately.
For home services, where the goal is to start a conversation before the lead calls someone else, that speed and visibility is the entire point.
Why email fails at the moment it matters most
Email has a spam problem. Filters are aggressive. Promotional emails, automated responses, and messages from unfamiliar senders often land in junk folders without the recipient ever knowing. Even when an email does land in the inbox, it competes with dozens or hundreds of other messages. A homeowner who submitted a form at noon might not check their email until evening, and by then they have already talked to two other contractors.
Email is also a formal channel. People read email when they are in a work mindset, sitting at a computer, ready to process information. It is not the channel they use when they are standing in their kitchen looking at a water stain on the ceiling and trying to figure out who to call. Text is.
SMS lands on the phone. The phone is always in hand. The notification shows up immediately. The message is short enough to read in five seconds. The barrier to replying is almost zero. That is why SMS converts at a higher rate for time-sensitive outreach like lead response.
What email is actually good for
This is not an argument against email entirely. Email is useful for longer-form communication, sending estimates, sharing documents, and following up after a job is complete. It is a good channel for relationship maintenance and for messages that do not require an immediate response.
But for the first touch with a new lead, the goal is speed and visibility. You want them to see the message in under a minute and feel like someone is paying attention. Email cannot reliably do that. SMS can.
Using both channels together
The strongest approach for most contractors is to use SMS for the initial response and follow-up sequence, and email for longer-form communication once a conversation is established. The SMS gets the conversation started. Email handles the details.
Response Pro focuses on the SMS side of this because that is where the speed-to-lead gap lives. If you want to see how the system works, read about the process or look at the plans.